Last week I felt a rare sense of achievement which made me wonder whether there was something odd about me. All I had done was win a game of tennis, a sport I play at a level that would be an insult to mediocrities to call mediocre. But reflecting on the reasons for this particular satisfaction I realised there was nothing inappropriate about it at all.
To understand this you need some boring background. The game was a men’s doubles round robin in which everyone plays one set with everyone else. There’s a way of scoring this – which no one in this group ever does – to rank players from first to fourth. My irrepressible inner statistician insists on working out what position I’ve finished in and reporting it to the rest of my self. That self wants to know because I am not a regular in the group and when I started occasionally playing with them to make up the numbers I was painfully aware that I was struggling to play at their level. So I was always very happy not to finish last.
Last week, for the first time, I actually was in all three winning pairs and so topped the non-existent league table. It might only have been low-grade tennis but this felt good for three reasons. First, I had surpassed myself, reaching a level I had not reached before. Second, it had taken time to do this. Third, it had required effort to improve, especially since I am not a natural athlete.
It struck me that these three key ingredients were common to every feeling of achievement I have felt in my life. My PhD took time, effort and it required me to up my intellectual game. Co-founding The Philosophers’ Magazine was the same, and in some ways it was more satisfying than the PhD because it drew less on my natural abilities. Among my books, Welcome to Everytown also feels like more an achievement than other books because it required atypical field work, not just desk-bound brain work.
In every case my achievement was relative. Against more objective standards, I’ve done nothing outstanding. Some not especially bright people have managed to get a doctorate. People have started much more successful magazines than TPM. Most of my own books comfortably outsold Everytown, and every one of those has been massively outsold by other people’s. As for the tennis, it wasn’t even a club tournament.
That’s as it should be. If we could only get a sense of achievement from being top of the pile, most of us would be doomed to perpetual dissatisfaction. By coincidence, this was one of the themes of a play I saw this week, Amadeus. The composer Salieri is eaten up by his recognition that nothing he has written or could ever write matches the work of his junior, Mozart. He is crushed by the unbearable weight of Mozart’s objective greatness. Had Salieri been able to take satisfaction in simply doing his best, the times when that was better than usual would have delighted him enough.
The dangers of comparing ourselves against too absolute a measure is also a theme of another play, Chekhov’s The Seagull. One character, Uncle Peter, had his successes in life but laments that he never became the author he aspired to be as a young man. Constantine did become an author, but is dissatisfied that his writing does not sing like that of Trigorin. But Trigorin is a Salieri who imagines people standing at his graveside after he has died saying, “Here lies Trigorin, a clever writer, but he was not as good as Turgenieff.” We aren’t told what Turgenieff thought but he probably would have beaten himself up for not being as good as Tolstoy.
Not all achievements are equal, however. The buzz I get from the occasional tennis triumph quickly dissipates. To get a sense of achievement that lasts relative success has to be at something that you deeply value. That’s why for all its momentary sweetness, my victory on court does not really compare with my books, PhD or TPM.
Still, without the spectre of excessively objective comparisons, the recipe for an enduring sense of achievement is reassuringly egalitarian. Anyone who works hard and long at something they value can from time to do something that surpasses what they have done before. Achievement enough for anyone, I think.
(By the way, the next time I played tennis I lost to someone I’m capable of beating 6-0. A humbling reminder that no matter how satisfying it is to succeed, it should never go to your head.)
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